Weaver, Boyd

ORAL HISTORY OF BOYD SMITH WEAVER
With daughter Melissa Weaver
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
August 9, 2005
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Mr. Weaver let’s start out by asking you first how and why you first came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mr. Weaver: When I was working in the magnesium plant in Henderson, Nevada, the plant which produced the magnesium that was used to burn Berlin, a man from S-50 in Oak Ridge – I’ve forgotten what it was called – came to my lab out there to recruit people.
Mr. Kolb: Was that the thermal diffusion process, I believe, S-50?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. He told me it was a glorified laboratory. Well I accepted the job. When I got here, first I stayed in a hotel in Knoxville, my wife and I – got here early December, 1944.
Mr. Kolb: Did you drive or take a train?
Mr. Weaver: We drove by way of Grand Junction, Colorado, my hometown, and we had to stay in the hotel for five nights, I think. On Friday, I finally went to – no, on Monday – I got there on Sunday – on Monday, went out to S-50.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you came right out to the plant?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have clearance set up already for you to get in?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I had been an operator for several months. Well it was not a glorified laboratory. There were twenty-one towers for doing what, I did not know, and they did not tell me. In spite of my going to work in the Laboratory, they did not tell me. All I knew was that the material had a higher freezing point than its boiling point. I was not told what it was. I climbed a ladder to get to the top to take a sample and I lost a little out in the air, and I could see the result of its condensing in the air.
Mr. Kolb: So uranium oxide was floating around in the air?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. They did not tell me what it was.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever heard of the word Tuballoy used?
Mr. Weaver: No, not then. No, I don’t believe I did. I was not told anything about it. There was no laboratory that I could see. They may have had one somewhere else. And, as I say, I lost some out in the air.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t want to do that very often, right?
Mr. Weaver: We got there, into Knoxville, on Sunday night and went out Monday morning when I – on Friday morning I went in and [inaudible] as well. I guess it was on Friday that I was told where my furniture was.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, was moving in?
Mr. Weaver: And I went into the town for an interview, found that my furniture was in an Eastman Tennessee [Tennessee Eastman] house, it had come in the same truck as other people who were going to Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: Were you working for Tennessee Eastman at that point?
Mr. Weaver: No, for S-50, for those people.
Mr. Kolb: But who was the contactor that you worked for, do you remember?
Mr. Weaver: I’ve forgotten what the name of it was.
Mr. Kolb: But it wasn’t Tennessee Eastman.
Mr. Weaver: Some outfit in Ohio.
Mr. Kolb: So your furniture was all mixed up?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, my furniture was there. By that time, I was disgusted with them and I find that in order to get my furniture back I had to get a release from Tennessee Eastman. I decided I didn’t want a release. So I went in to interview for a job with them, [but] went back the next morning and told them I didn’t want to work for them. Well, the man who handled the money refused to pay for my hotel bill; I never did get it. They told me the day before that they had housing in South Harriman.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. And you said, “Where is that?” [laughter]
Mr. Weaver: I guess I even went out there; I’m not sure.
Mr. Kolb: And your wife, at this time, was staying in Knoxville?
Mr. Weaver: In the hotel.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of upsetting to say the least.
Mr. Weaver: Well, so the people at Y-12 – I didn’t know it was Y-12, but Tennessee Eastman – took me out. I guess they arranged for me a place to stay that night. Next morning I went out.
Mr. Kolb: Did you stay in the Alexander Inn by any chance or the Guest House?
Mr. Weaver: No, in Knoxville, the big hotel. What is it?
Mr. Kolb: UT uses it now. Andrew Johnson?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, Andrew Johnson Hotel, I’d forgotten. Well, so I guess it was on Monday we went – well I think we stayed at a house for a night or two. On Monday we came out here, and so we were put in a house – our furniture was in a house on Latimer Lane.
Mr. Kolb: They found your furniture and put it in Latimer Lane. Well, that’s an improvement.
Mr. Weaver: And very shortly, my wife decided she did not want to live there. On one morning, our heater had something wrong with it, and there was mud all around us; it was raining. We’d come from southern Nevada where it didn’t rain more than about once in six months.
Mr. Kolb: Totally different.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, but we stayed there a few days, and some way she got out and found a house in Inskip. She didn’t drive at that time; I don’t know how she did it.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe she got a bus?
Mr. Weaver: She had never driven.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe she got a bus over there, the bus service maybe.
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know how she got there. But anyway, we moved to Inskip, stayed there until the last day of ’45.
Mr. Kolb: Now were you working in the Y-12 plant then for Eastman?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, that’s when I was taken on. Then for about three weeks, I came out everyday on a bus to – not to Y-12, but to the place on Laboratory Road where they had lectures everyday on everything.
Mr. Kolb: Was that the ‘Castle on the Hill’ so-called?
Mr. Weaver: Well, no, the ‘Castle’ hadn’t been built yet.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, it hadn’t been built yet, oh, I see. Well someplace else near that.
Mr. Weaver: Just below the turnpike a little ways, there’s a yellow building, still there, that’s where I was for I think three weeks or so, waiting for my clearance, I was told.
Mr. Kolb: Is that the Tunnell Building, on the corner?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, that’s right. No, it wasn’t. I know where the Tunnell Building is – but south of there on Latimer Road, just on the bend – it’s still there. I went by it yesterday.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll have to check it out. They had, like, orientation talks there and that kind of thing?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and we were told a lot of things about security and safety and all that sort of stuff. Same woman, I think, made all the lectures. Along the way in, I noticed some equipment, and I heard all these things. I was wondering what it was all about.
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t tell you what you would be doing.
Mr. Weaver: No, but I guessed.
Mr. Kolb: You guessed?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. I wasn’t supposed to know; I wasn’t told. Well after three weeks or so of that –
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t know whether you guessed right or wrong did you?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, till a lot later.
Mr. Weaver: But someway there had been some news about a bomb, I think in the newspapers – well, about the possibility of using it. I knew it was – can be made an explosive. After three weeks, I was taken out to Y-12. What’s the name of the lawyer who was –
Mr. Kolb: Tunnell?
Mr. Weaver: No. I can’t think of his name.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Worthington?
Mr. Weaver: No. [possibly referring to an image] He took me out to Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: Gene Joyce took you out to Y-12?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, he was working –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he was out there working?
Mr. Weaver: No, he was – for some reason he was in the same building I was in and I don’t know what he was doing. Yeah, Gene Joyce. I’ve met him since then.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, he passed away several years ago.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and he took me out there. I went in, went into a lab – my supervisor asked me whether I knew what they were doing. I told him I’d guessed. I’d guessed right.
Mr. Kolb: He told you, “You guessed right”?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, he told me.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Weaver: Of course, then I was supposed to know, at Y-12, because I couldn’t be doing any work without knowing what it was. It was the Uranium Lab.
Mr. Kolb: But did you use the word ‘Uranium’?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, well, not in public.
Mr. Kolb: Right, okay.
Mr. Weaver: I was told it was Tuballoy for anybody else. So I was introduced to it.
Mr. Kolb: who was your first supervisor then at Y-12?
Mr. Weaver: I’ve forgotten his name – oh, Getter. He was a twenty-four-year-old from a University in California – and I can’t think now – it was one in northern California somewhere. I was thirty-four and he was twenty-four.
Mr. Kolb: Did he have a Ph.D. like you did?
Mr. Weaver: I think he did. I didn’t have a Ph.D.; I had a Masters from the University of Chicago. I don’t know where his Ph.D. was from.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember anybody else you worked with then, initially, in that laboratory?
Mr. Weaver: I can’t think of any names now.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know Bill Wilcox?
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t meet Bill until later, but on the way going into Y-12, I met Jeanie.
Mr. Kolb: Jeanie Wilcox.
Mr. Weaver: For some reason, I knew her name. She must have told me on the way in, but she was a guard at the gate.
Mr. Kolb: She was?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Was she married to Bill then already or not?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, I knew her name. So I met her first and knew her name.
Mr. Kolb: And she was a guard.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. I didn’t realize that. So did you spend the rest of the war years at Y-12 then?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. Well, it was less than a year left.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What did you do, Father?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, what did you actually do?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What was your position?
Mr. Kolb: What was your position? Did you analyze?
Mr. Weaver: I was a chemist. I wasn’t an analyst but I did work with uranium on processes. In fact, in the first – most the work in the beginning was on recovering uranium from, well, from waste more than anything else.
Mr. Kolb: Other materials, right.
Mr. Weaver: From the calutron separation.
Mr. Kolb: Every little microgram counted.
Mr. Weaver: Yes. Yeah, well, at those lectures in the beginning, we’ve been told that the material was so valuable that they had to scrub the floors to get whatever mud had been released and to process that to get the product, though I wasn’t told what it was. That’s part of the reason I guessed, that there couldn’t be anything more valuable than uranium-235.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, let’s go back to your living conditions. Were you still living in Inskip, Knoxville during this time?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, until the last day of 1945, when we moved to Dixie Lane.
Mr. Kolb: After the war ended?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Last day of ’45 – you said that, yeah. Okay, and during those war years did you take a bus to work every day from Inskip? Is that the way you got back and forth?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and my wife started working there in the Spring, so she rode the bus to Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: So you could ride to work together, kind of, at least till you got to the Y-12 site?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, well, I was in a riding pool for a good part of the time.
Mr. Kolb: That’s some other people that were going to the same place, kind of?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: When you lived in Inskip and you were not a local Tennessean, you didn’t have a Tennessee accent, if there is such a thing, how did you get along with the other people around you that were natives, so to speak?
Mr. Weaver: It didn’t make any difference.
Mr. Kolb: Had no problem?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Good. They accepted you, and, of course, I guess there were a lot of other –
Mr. Weaver: Oh, yes, they were from all over.
Mr. Kolb: – visitors from all over staying wherever they could get rental property, I guess.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: When you went to St. James Episcopal Church, Father?
Mr. Weaver: No, I went to the Presbyterian Church in Fountain City most of the time. Though I remember, when we went to St. James – well, my older daughter was born during that time. My wife quit working with that and when Cynthia was six weeks old, I remember we went to St. Stephen’s, or, rather, to St. James.
Mr. Kolb: Episcopal Church?
Mr. Weaver: Episcopal Church.
Mr. Kolb: Is that in the Inskip area? I’m not familiar with where that is.
Mr. Weaver: No, it’s on North Broadway.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, I think I know where it is. It’s an old church, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: John Bull was the minister. Was John Bull minister then, Father?
Mr. Weaver: No, John was – well, he became minister there, but he was working at K-25.
Mr. Kolb: John Bull?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And he became a minister?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, yeah that’s right, not until later. But he was living in Oak Ridge, I think, in ’45 anyway. He quit to go to seminary.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see, after the war, probably.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t have to deal as much with the muddy conditions in Oak Ridge, once you were living in Inskip, you had normal paved roads to go over and that sort of thing. But I guess when you came into town you had –
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, well, the road there was paved but there was mud all around.
Mr. Kolb: It’s interesting that you’re one of the few people – there are several other people I’ve talked to – that guessed what the project was, even though they didn’t know for sure.
Mr. Weaver: Some others guessed too.
Mr. Kolb: And they didn’t know until the actual bomb was dropped and they were confirmed, but –
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, but of course I knew it as soon as I got to the Lab.
Mr. Kolb: I often wondered about that, how could chemists not know what they were working with, because they had to deal with the physical properties to some extent, into chemistry of uranium, so I just never could understand how they would not know. They figured it out for themselves. But I was always told you were never supposed to discuss your work, and I guess you didn’t, except at the plant when you were in there.
Mr. Weaver: No, the chemists were told, but probably not – some people that worked – the helpers, technicians might not have known.
Mr. Kolb: And you didn’t discuss uranium in front of them, I assume.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: So what were you doing? What procedures and how did you go about developing procedures, Father?
Mr. Kolb: How did you develop the procedures that you used, the analytical procedures?
Mr. Weaver: I can’t say I developed – I didn’t develop them.
Mr. Kolb: But they were there?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But you were refining them weren’t you, refining the procedures?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Did you refine them any or improve them?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Where did these procedures come from that you followed? Who developed them?
Mr. Weaver: No, they were mostly solvent extraction.
Mr. Kolb: Solvent extraction had already been developed prior to that.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know when that started. I guess you spent a lot of time and effort reclaiming everything and processing the residues.
Mr. Weaver: Of course I didn’t actually do a lot of that, because I worked on –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but that was an emphasis, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What equipment was used, Father?
Mr. Weaver: Ordinary laboratory equipment.
Mr. Kolb: And ‘solvent extraction columns,’ they call it.
Mr. Weaver: No, I didn’t have columns then, but I did later. Separation – well, but they didn’t have those until I was using them on rare earth instead of uranium.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well it all worked out pretty well, although there was a lot of tension as to getting enough material for a bomb and, as I understand it, General Groves was not happy for a long time until the production of Y-12 really wrapped up, so to speak, sometime in ’45, when they knew we’d have enough material to get a bomb made. Towards the end of the war before the bomb was dropped, was there any discussion about production and how things were going in the production of uranium with the calutrons? Any discussion of that with the staff?
Mr. Weaver: Not to my knowledge, no.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Was there any safety equipment provided to you?
Mr. Kolb: What about safety?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Exposure prevention?
Mr. Kolb: Safety equipment for your exposure to uranium or anything else?
Mr. Weaver: No, I don’t think so.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, it was not a hazard; just didn’t want to ingest it, of course.
Mr. Weaver: No, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: How many people were in your lab?
Mr. Kolb: How many people were in your lab, about? Fifty, a hundred?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, no.
Mr. Kolb: Smaller number? Twenty, maybe?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I think I eventually had my own lab. No, there were only a few of us.
Mr. Kolb: But can you remember any other –
Mr. Weaver: I was in 9731-3, I think.
Mr. Kolb: 9731-3 Building?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I think so.
Mr. Kolb: Can you remember any –
Mr. Weaver: Oh and I – well, that’s right, I knew about the calutron, the experimental calutron in 9731.
Mr. Kolb: An experimental calutron.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Was this a –
Mr. Weaver: There were calutrons, two calutrons in the 9731 building.
Mr. Kolb: You say ‘experimental.’ Were they different than the main –
Mr. Weaver: No, I think the reason for it was to – you could produce a small amount – but mostly to – it was a pilot plant, and it had calutrons.
Mr. Kolb: It was a pilot plant.
Mr. Weaver: Two units of two different – twenty-four inch and forty-eight inch, both, diameter.
Mr. Kolb: And they were run before the main calutrons came into –
Mr. Weaver: Yes. As they were being built.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, it was an early experience with the process?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I heard about that. I didn’t realize – I thought that had all happened earlier than ’44, but I didn’t know. So they were the pilot plant. And you were probably getting material from those pilot plant calutrons.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see. Okay, Boyd, how did you find out that the bomb was dropped? It was publicly announced by President Truman that we’d used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. How did you first hear about that? Were you at work?
Mr. Weaver: I was at work.
Mr. Kolb: You were at work?
Mr. Weaver: And the word came – everybody heard about it.
Mr. Kolb: Once it came, it spread like wildfire, as they say.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I see, but you and some others knew about it already, so you just – it was a matter of time before – of course no one knew how well the bomb was going to work or anything like that. So, the people you worked with, how did they react, that didn’t know about it before hand? Did they all go “hunh”?
Mr. Weaver: Well I guess they were surprised.
Mr. Kolb: Did they continue their job that day or what happened?
Mr. Weaver: Well, most of the people around stayed here, but –
Mr. Kolb: I mean the actual day of the announcement.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: How did they [react]? Did they continue working or did you just – what happened?
Mr. Weaver: Well, there probably was a lot of discussion for a while but –
Mr. Kolb: Was there any partying?
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t see anybody leaving.
Mr. Kolb: I see, okay.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Father was it all produced by the Labs or did it come from Knoxville. What was the source of news?
Mr. Kolb: How did you get your news back then? Did it come from Knoxville or how?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Of course, there was radio.
Mr. Weaver: No, I didn’t have a –
Mr. Kolb: Did you have a radio?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t believe I had a radio then.
Mr. Kolb: Were there local newspapers you could read.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. Of course, I was living in –
Mr. Kolb: Inskip.
Mr. Weaver: Inskip.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: How did you keep up with the news from the War, about the War?
Mr. Kolb: How did you find out about the news of the War?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, well, I did take a newspaper when I lived in – I think when – or at least after I got out of here. That’s before I came out here.
Mr. Kolb: A Knoxville newspaper.
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And so there was general news available. I think there was an Oak Ridge paper put out by the Army also. Did you get that too?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: I guess that was more for the residents living inside of Oak Ridge. Okay, and your wife worked at Y-12 also, you said.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And what did she do? What kind of job did she have?
Mr. Weaver: I think it was a secretarial job of some kind.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Mother later told me that she was in charge of filing.
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: She did not understand the system. [laughter]
Mr. Weaver: And I never told her what we were doing.
Mr. Kolb: Right, well you weren’t –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: She said there were copies and copies and copies of everything.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, yeah, sure. Good old carbon copies back then.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: [inaudible] filing.
Mr. Kolb: Now she did not know what was going on. How did she react?
Mr. Weaver: I guess I must have mentioned some chemical we used. She used the word there, talking with someone, and was warned that she shouldn’t even mention that; it wasn’t uranium.
Mr. Kolb: But something related.
Mr. Weaver: Just some chemical; I’ve forgotten what it was, a solvent or something.
Mr. Kolb: How did she react when she heard the news of the dropping of the bomb?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: You weren’t there, I guess, but when you got back together back home did you talk about it some?
Mr. Weaver: Not much.
Mr. Kolb: Did you tell her that you already knew about the uranium project?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I guess so.
Mr. Kolb: You could talk about it openly then, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well it was an exciting time. Of course, during that time they were still building Oak Ridge, basically.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you saw that process going on too, the construction of this and that and the other thing. How did that strike you?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Just a lot of activity right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have an occasion to use the hospital facilities or the doctors in Oak Ridge, or did you have to do that?
Mr. Weaver: Not right away, no.
Mr. Kolb: Not right away, till you moved.
Mr. Weaver: Of course, we were still living in Inskip when Cynthia was born, so we used St. Mary’s Hospital.
Mr. Kolb: What year was that, about?
Mr. Weaver: 1945.
Mr. Kolb: 1945, that’s you.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: No, August 1945, my older sister Cynthia.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, your older – I’m sorry, you’re Melissa, I’m sorry, got confused. So when did you move?
Mr. Weaver: So, Caroline worked for only a short time.
Mr. Kolb: I see, until she got pregnant and had to stop, yeah. So when did you move into Oak Ridge, you told me already. I’ve forgotten.
Mr. Weaver: The last day of 1945.
Mr. Kolb: The last day of ’45, okay, and you moved into what?
Mr. Weaver: 110 Dixie Lane.
Mr. Kolb: 110 Dixie Lane. Was this a cemesto house?
Mr. Weaver: It’s a “B” house, yes.
Mr. Kolb: A “B” house, okay and had, what, two bedrooms?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Probably? Was the street paved then or gravel?
Mr. Weaver: It was at least gravel.
Mr. Kolb: The mud problem was not as bad?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, no.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It’s on the top of ridge. It’s better.
Mr. Kolb: Right, I remember roughly where it is, yeah. So you became a part of the early Oak Ridge, then. And you had one child at that time?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: When you moved back to Oak Ridge? And what church did you attend then? Did you have an Episcopal church that you attended then, or how did that work?
Mr. Weaver: The Rector of St. Stephen’s lived in 102 Dixie Lane.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: That was the Rectory for many years.
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Who was the Rector, Father?
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t Pollard, was it?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: McGregor.
Mr. Kolb: McGregor?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Was it McGregor?
Mr. Kolb: Was it McGregor?
Mr. Weaver: No, not until later.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay. If it doesn’t come to you, that’s all right. And was St. Stephen’s where it is now located?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: They had a temporary –
Mr. Weaver: Oh, we met at –
Mr. Kolb: Chapel on the Hill?
Mr. Weaver: At Chapel on the Hill at five o’clock on Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Kolb: P.M., I see, okay. You were one of the later churches? Okay, I see.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It was Saturday or Sunday, five p.m., Father?
Mr. Kolb: Was it on Sunday at five o’clock?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get involved with any of the other earlier organizations at that time when Oak Ridge was getting formed up, you might say?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Well, tell him more about how St. Stephen’s evolved. He was one of the founders.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, tell us about how the church St. Stephen’s evolved, because you were an early member, right?
Mr. Weaver: Well, I really wasn’t a member. I was still a Presbyterian, but because I was near the Rector, I talked with him, and they called on me to teach a class of –
Mr. Kolb: Adult class?
Mr. Weaver: – of boys, fourth to sixth graders, even though I wasn’t a member, but because I lived near the Rector I was –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But also, Father, I think because of your background as a child who was brought up in the Church of the Brethren – so he was very well-versed in the Bible. His grandfather was a minister.
Mr. Kolb: And you also had taught school earlier for a while, too, so you had a teaching experience there. So you got involved in their Sunday School Program, so to speak, I guess?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And mother was Anglican.
Mr. Weaver: So that spring, that was the first of the Sunday School.
Mr. Kolb: Where did they have Sunday School classes? I mean you couldn’t meet at the Chapel on the Hill. Did you have to have some other building?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Did they meet at the Rectory?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, no, at the Rectory.
Mr. Kolb: At the Rectory. And where was that located?
Mr. Weaver: 102 Dixie Lane. As I said, I lived right next to them, and Carolyn got acquainted with them, and that way I got drawn in.
Mr. Kolb: That’s where the priest lived, and that was the Rectory.
Mr. Weaver: I was invited to a meeting, didn’t know what it was about, but it was to organize the Sunday School, and I was appointed a teacher.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Was it Dandridge, father? Dandridge?
Mr. Weaver: No, he was Bishop.
Mr. Kolb: The name of the Bishop was Dandridge?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, I think Dandridge was the Bishop at that time. But my class met that spring out under a tree on the lawn. We had a meeting first, worship meeting, and then I took my class outside. Fortunately, it did not rain that spring.
Mr. Kolb: You were fortunate. Is that because there wasn’t enough room in the building or you just liked –
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, there wasn’t enough room. As I remember, there were a total of eighty children. The next fall, we had a Sunday school in the High School and congregation met in the –
Mr. Kolb: In the gymnasium, maybe?
Mr. Weaver: Gymnasium.
Mr. Kolb: Of the High School?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I see. So the schools rented the space out for organizations like the churches?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that. Okay, interesting.
Mr. Weaver: In fact, I think that was – I’m not sure if it was ten or eleven, but anyway, another congregation met an hour before or after that.
Mr. Kolb: So did you outgrow the Chapel on the Hill? Is that why you moved to the High School?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I guess so.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: I know they were still there in 1949, because I was baptized under the basket.
Mr. Kolb: So when did they move from the High School to the present location? I guess that’s where they built their permanent facility, where the present church is?
Mr. Weaver: Well, as soon as it was built.
Mr. Kolb: But you don’t recall the date exactly?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Because Tommy was born in August ’51 and he was baptized in the new church.
Mr. Kolb: Did you continue teaching Sunday school for a long time with St. Stephen’s?
Mr. Weaver: No, just those two – well, one spring and the next year.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Mr. Weaver: And then I was appointed Registrar of the Sunday School and continued to be Registrar for forty-five years.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness sakes. Take care of all the records, attendance records?
Mr. Weaver: Until ’91 when my sight got too poor.
Mr. Kolb: Wow. That’s a long, long, long service you put in there. Did your wife – was she involved with the Sunday school?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, yes, she had a class for a while, later.
Mr. Kolb: You mentioned that when you were a child, your family was a member of the Church of the Brethren, I think you said, and that was out in the West, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and when I was in Anderson, Indiana, I joined the Presbyterian Church.
Mr. Kolb: And then you became Episcopal. But your mother was a member of the Anglican Church?
Mr. Weaver: My mother? No, she was a Methodist.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, maybe it was your wife.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, my wife was an Episcopalian.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so that’s sort of why you leaned toward Episcopalian. Did you know Dr. Pollard through the church?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: St. Stephens.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, and I was elected to the vestry of St. Stephens six days before I was confirmed.
Mr. Kolb: [laughter] That’s some kind of a record!
Mr. Weaver: And that Sunday I was – the meeting was on Monday night – the next Sunday, I was confirmed.
Mr. Kolb: Is that legal – to not be a member, and be a member of the vestry? [laughter] I guess they were glad to have you.
Mr. Weaver: I had been nominated a year before that. The congregation was told that I was not eligible.
Mr. Kolb: Okay Boyd, very interesting. You’ve got so many things to keep up with here. Would you say that St. Stephen’s Church was one of the main activities that you took part in, obviously, you and your wife teaching and that sort of thing and becoming the Registrar? Did you involve yourself in any other of the civic organizations or what have you back then? You were pretty busy raising babies, too.
Mr. Weaver: Not civic, but there was the American Chemical Society. Of course, I went to all the meetings in the plant. And I had a projector which I took home all the time when I went to meetings.
Mr. Kolb: That was more rare back in those days, probably, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Well ALSO is part of the church.
Mr. Weaver: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, your church delivered meals to indigent families?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, on Christmas and Easter and they still do it.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But back then, we would deliver them to the houses. I remember getting in the car with you, Father, and taking boxes of food and going into shacks.
Mr. Weaver: Now they have to come to the church.
Mr. Kolb: But back then you delivered them right to their homes?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And this was people living how far away? Up in Wartburg area?
Mr. Weaver: No, North Clinton quite a ways. I went once, anyway.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: We also went to a place between here and Oliver Springs. Did we go to Windrock?
Mr. Kolb: Windrock?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: How about Briceville? That’s up in the hills north of here.
Mr. Weaver: No didn’t go to Briceville.
Mr. Kolb: There are plenty of underprivileged families around, didn’t have to go very far, I know, yeah. So your church had a mission to – the food preparation.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, we got our list from the –
Mr. Kolb: The County maybe?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: Let’s talk about your experience with the Oak Ridge Schools. Your daughters grew up and your son – you had a son and two daughters, right? Which school did they attend? Elementary school, that is.
Mr. Weaver: They started at – right down here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that would be –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Elm Grove.
Mr. Kolb: Elm Grove?
Mr. Weaver: Elm Grove.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: We would walk across Florida Avenue and down either East Fernhill Road or East Faunce Road through the woods then to the school.
Mr. Kolb: Was that on boardwalks that were built?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: No, just children’s trails through the woods.
Mr. Kolb: Trails you made just by going, traffic. Okay.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And then we went to Jefferson Junior, and we would walk along a trail between Florida Avenue and Georgia through the woods.
Mr. Kolb: Where was Jefferson Junior then? Was it the same location it is now?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Jefferson Junior was where the High School had been, on Blankenship.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And we went to Jefferson through ninth grade and then attended the High School building where it is now, on Providence Road.
Mr. Kolb: But going back to your elementary school days, did you interact with teachers much? And tell me about what you thought about the education your children got back then.
Mr. Weaver: Well we got acquainted with some of the teachers.
Mr. Kolb: Remember any of their names offhand?
Mr. Weaver: I can’t think of any really.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Oh Father, the name of the teacher who came in from Oliver Springs, what was her name? Worthington? Williams?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: She was marvelous.
Mr. Kolb: You were in her class?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: I’m trying to think.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I just wondered, yeah, anyway.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But we went up to her old country house in Petros. Did she live in Oak Ridge? Yes, I think she had a place here – that was her family home, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: She died just a few years – she lived to be in her nineties.
Mr. Kolb: But your kids did a lot of activity, I’m sure, through the schools. Were they active in any sports? Did they play basketball or whatever? Do you remember?
Mr. Weaver: Thomas played tennis.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good. Well my son, Tom, played tennis too.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and played tennis in college.
Mr. Kolb: And they had a tennis team even back then? That’s interesting.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Well that would have been in the mid ’60s.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that was a lot later, right, I understand, when he got to high school. Tell us about Dr. Willard. Was he a visiting scientist or what?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. He was a professor, head of Analytical Chemistry at University of Ohio.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Michigan.
Mr. Weaver: Michigan, yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Ann Arbor. What was Dr. Willard’s first name? Hobart?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Hobart, okay. How did you first meet him? Was he a consultant here?
Mr. Weaver: Oh –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It’s a good story.
Mr. Weaver: I met him at a –
Mr. Kolb: American Chemical Society?
Mr. Weaver: Chemical Society meeting in Evanston, Illinois.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What year?
Mr. Weaver: I’ve forgotten. And he told me that he was going to come down here – been invited to come down for the summer.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they had visiting –
Mr. Weaver: That’s why I got acquainted with him.
Mr. Kolb: And he worked with your group? Consulted with your group basically?
Mr. Weaver: Well, with analytical labs in both Y-12 and K-25.
Mr. Kolb: I see, okay.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But didn’t he overhear you once? Where was that, in Chicago? You were talking with somebody and they asked you about a procedure. You told me this story, I think, where he overheard you giving recommendation on how to extract or purify something and he overheard you in the next room.
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know about that.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: This was before you met him.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Were you in Akron, I mean in Barberton?
Mr. Weaver: That must have been the meeting at Evanston, then.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, it was Illinois?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What year was that? Was that when you were still working on your Master’s in Chicago?
Mr. Weaver: Oh no, it was after I came here.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Oh.
Mr. Weaver: Quite a while after I came here.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Master’s was ’36.
Mr. Kolb: So Dr. Willard was one of several visiting chemists that consulted with your laboratory?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah and then the Willards spent a summer here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Weaver: He had two daughters.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Nancy and – I’ve forgotten the other name.
Mr. Kolb: Were they friends of you and your sister?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: They were older, but she’s now a Vassar professor. He would come for dinner when he came to visit?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He would stay at the Alexander Inn, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And he would come to the house for dinner, and he was vegetarian, so we had spinach soufflé that mother made.
Mr. Kolb: [laughter] Special entrees.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: You remember those lovely evenings, Father? He would let us play the piano for him.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. He was a lucky man.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He was a really lovely man.
Mr. Kolb: He was from Ohio?
Mr. Weaver: No, no, Michigan.
Mr. Kolb: Michigan, you said, Michigan.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He was the author of the text, wasn’t he?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: For Analytical Chemistry.
Mr. Kolb: Oh my, so he was rather prominent in that field.
Mr. Weaver: And we visited him in Los Alamos.
Mr. Kolb: Did he work in the Project, in the Manhattan Project?
Mr. Weaver: He was out there for a summer, I think.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Just a summer.
Mr. Weaver: He had told me here – once when he visited my lab – he told me he was going out there and invited me to stop and see them and we did on our trip to Colorado and then back by way of New Mexico.
Mr. Kolb: What year was this approximately? Do you remember? Was it in the ’50s or ’60s?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: About 1960, would you say, Father?
Mr. Weaver: ’51 maybe.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: No, I was older, wasn’t I?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, yeah, yes you were, that’s right. Oh, it couldn’t have been then; it had to be later.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Late ’50s.
Mr. Kolb: Late ’50s or early ’60s, okay.
Mr. Weaver: With all three of you children.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It was late ’50s, I think.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, because you remember it, yeah. Well there were a lot of – a lot of interesting people came here and stayed. Some of them just consulted.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Tell him about the visiting Russians.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, what about the Russians that visited? Were there chemists from Russia [that] came over here?
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t know them.
Mr. Kolb: Did they visit your lab or some of the people you knew?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: In the ’60s? You [inaudible] copyrights.
Mr. Kolb: What about the Russians and copyright?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: One of your articles you found in a Russian journal? It was translated to Russian?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t remember it.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well that’s okay. You published in various journals, I assume. American Chemical Society journal, probably?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a long career in – oh, you went into stable isotopes as I recall –
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: – after the war.
Mr. Weaver: I had charge of the chemistry in Stable Isotopes, starting in ’46.
Mr. Kolb: Was Dr. Keim involved in that too?
Mr. Weaver: He was my boss.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and did you know Grady Whitman by any chance? I think he worked –
Mr. Weaver: The name is familiar, but I’m not sure I –
Mr. Kolb: He was an engineer and he worked in that program, probably little different area. So you went through the periodic table, as I recall, in that program?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, sixty elements. The gaseous elements, of course, were not separated by calutrons but by other means, and I didn’t have anything to do with that. But all the things that I was in charge of, the chemistry and the supplying of food material and taking care of all the products.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t want to mess that up after spending all the time.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, I had a group I’d developed, decided on the processes for developing all the –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, was that similar to the uranium chemistry kind of work or did you have to develop new techniques?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. There were things that were known, but we still had to apply them.
Mr. Kolb: And a wide range of chemistry, over sixty elements, rare earths and everything else, yeah. How long did that program operate approximately? It started in the – was in the late ’40s, after the war?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And then it ran for how long, do you remember, approximately?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, I’m not sure just when it quit – just a few years ago. They had [inaudible] elements that they worked on.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a lot of stable isotope chemistry in your work here. Did you retire on that program, or did you move on to something else beyond the Stable Isotopes Program?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, no, I moved on to Chemical Technology.
Mr. Kolb: And you went to – did you work in X-10 then?
Mr. Weaver: I moved to – yes. Well, Chem Tech took over Stable Isotopes, when I was out of that building. Keim decided – well, actually, he had somebody else who needed the job, whom he wanted to favor, gave him my job while I still worked on rare earth separation. I had – in the same room as Stable Isotopes, or the same building – I had eighty-five stages of separation for rare earths. I was doing that while I –
[break in recording]
Mr. Weaver: That’s that.
Mr. Kolb: One of your papers was in a text here your daughter just gave me. “Liquid extraction of rare earths.”
Mr. Weaver: Oh.
Mr. Kolb: And this is from – right. So you had a long career in rare earth extraction.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Amazing. Did you – did he work in that program or he worked in early chemical –
Mr. Weaver: No, he was at somewhere, X-10. I don’t know what he did.
Mr. Kolb: I think he did some of the fission product chemistry or something like that. So, Dr. Stoughton, he died probably at least five years ago. I know his son is a classmate with my son. Bob is his name, or Robert Stoughton, and they’re good friends. Bob –
[break in recording]
Ms. Melissa Weaver: – shoot, name. She is now living with her son out West. She’s the journalist, he was the chemist, oh, you know them. Father was a team leader.
Mr. Kolb: And somebody got killed in an avalanche out west, skiing?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Mountain climbing.
Mr. Kolb: Mountain climbing, okay, thank you.
Mr. Weaver: Now I can’t think of their name. He spent a summer with me.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: His father’s name was George?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Starts with A.
Mr. Weaver: Well, and, of course, I knew his mother, and still know her, see her at concerts. [Editor’s note: June Adamson]
Mr. Kolb: Did you know S. C. Lind? The Scarboro technician, I guess it was?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: I think he worked at X-10 also, probably, yeah.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Lived up on East Drive.
Mr. Kolb: Well, there’s so many names, it’s hard to remember when you don’t use them. I have the same problem. It’s just one of those things, getting older. Okay, well, what do you think about living in Oak Ridge over the years? Have you enjoyed it? What do you think of Oak Ridge as a community?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, it’s been a good place to live.
Mr. Kolb: Good place to live? I know your family was involved in lot of the earlier work efforts to help the surrounding communities and that sort of thing, but a lot of people that I talk to that have lived here their adult life, they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Would you agree with that? No reason to leave, in other words?
Mr. Weaver: No reason to leave.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you retired in 1975, is that right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. My official retirement date was ’75, but I stayed on for about two years more in the lab, and then got a job with SAIC for a while.
Mr. Kolb: Was it a part-time job, or full-time?
Mr. Weaver: No, it was part-time.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Contract.
Mr. Kolb: Sort of like a consultant, right. But you never thought about moving anywhere else.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Had your roots pretty much established here, yeah, that’s good. Any other anecdotes you might remember about your life here that you might want to contribute, that you might think were important? I know that a lot of things happened over the years.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Can you talk about Fred Kappelmann?
Mr. Weaver: He was one of my group in Stable Isotopes, and Coleman was my boss for a while in Chem Tech.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Then, Virginia Coleman worked for you.
Mr. Weaver: Yes, that’s right, Virginia worked for me way back for a short time in ’45.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know Fred Kappelmann personally, but I knew of him at the Lab, at Chem Tech. Is he still alive, do you know?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know either.
Mr. Weaver: Haven’t heard from him for a while.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Who were the families who lived on Dixie Lane with us, do you remember? That was quite a group that lasted for quite a while, even though we only lived there for two years. No, more than that. ’46 to ’59?
Mr. Weaver: Well the Bayeses lived on –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Charlie and Julie Bayes?
Mr. Kolb: He’s a chemist also, isn’t he?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I think he’s still around.
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I’m not sure, but I think he is.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Julie died last year, or this year.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, but Charlie is still around, yeah, I see him once in a while.
Mr. Weaver: Well Charlie went with us when we went out to the Stiefs’ out near Kingston.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Stanley and Velma Stief.
Mr. Weaver: Their daughter and her family live out there. Well, her daughter and son both live out on the way to Kingston, and they lived across the street from us on Dixie Lane.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Remember the evenings when the Dixie Lane people would get together? Even after we moved here, to Fernhill?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Sort of a neighborhood association, just informal, kind of?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And to this day, we keep – we don’t see each other very often, but we keep track of each other.
Mr. Weaver: Well, and the women met here evenings for a card game.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And there would be birthday parties for the children.
Mr. Kolb: The change is something, a little bit – I see you and your daughter at the Playhouse quite a bit. You’ve been going to the Playhouse a long time?
Mr. Weaver: For a long while.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Father doesn’t go anymore because he can’t see or hear.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, in fact, when the Playhouse had Our Town, I was the undertaker [Joe Stoddard] in the play.
Mr. Kolb: You were? Were you successful? Good. So you had a little acting career too. Did Paul Ebert recruit you for that role?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He was a natural.
Mr. Kolb: Oh is that right? Did you use your chemistry on people? I’m just kidding.
Mr. Weaver: I had a few lines to say.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well certainly. That was a big cast as I recall in Our Town, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And you’ve attended the concerts all along, haven’t you, Father?
Mr. Kolb: The Oak Ridge Symphony? Oak Ridge is a wonderful arts community. That’s one of the unique features.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Talk about the Art Center and Mother’s role.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Ewing, talk about Ewing.
Mr. Kolb: Bruce Ewing from UT?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Buck Ewing.
Mr. Kolb: Buck Ewing, I’m sorry.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Buck Ewing and Charles Counts? Mother knew him.
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: These are people Mother knew.
Mr. Kolb: Your mother was an artist – well, your wife was an artist.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, she was Director of the Art Center for three years.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And volunteered before that.
Mr. Weaver: Well, and she got a degree in Fine Arts when she was sixty years old.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, at UT?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Was Ewing involved in that, Dr. Ewing?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. Yeah, he was her major professor.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He taught classes out here at the Art Center as well. She helped establish the Art Center. It was first up in the buildings at the top of Delaware, near the water tower.
Mr. Kolb: They have their own facility now, right?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Yeah, she was instrumental in the building and establishment of that building.
Mr. Kolb: I see, well, all these institutions needed their pioneers, so to speak. They wouldn’t be here without them. Yeah, that’s wonderful. Well you’ve had a great career and your daughter has showed me a lot of your publications that have contributed a lot to the science of chemistry and all, and it’s amazing now how we – the building blocks are always important, you know. People have to learn from the past. Well, any other comments you want to make before we wrap it up, Boyd? I don’t want to wear you out here. You’ve done a lot of recollecting. You want to tell us more about the Stable [Isotope Program] –
Mr. Weaver: Someway I got acquainted with a man at Argonne who was then at the University of Chicago, on the campus, and I went up to see him about rare earth separation. Now I can’t think of his name.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mr. Weaver: I also visited him at Arc after he moved out to Argonne, visited him there, and he had solvent extraction, several stages.
Mr. Kolb: But he was just duplicating work that had already been done here, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Basically, I would assume, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What year was that, Father?
Mr. Weaver: I’ve forgotten.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: When, about?
Mr. Kolb: In the ’60s, maybe? It’s okay, probably in the ’60s, you think?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: When did you meet Seaborg?
Mr. Kolb: When did you meet Dr. Seaborg?
Mr. Weaver: I met him –
Mr. Kolb: Because he was here during the War years.
Mr. Weaver: I met him at a meeting in Chicago.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ACS meeting?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: After the War?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: It was after the War?
Mr. Weaver: Oh yes, quite a while after.
Mr. Kolb: But he was here doing plutonium chemistry.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t he? I thought he was.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: No, I’m sorry. He did that in Chicago, I believe, yeah, but I thought he was also here. Tell me about what you thought of Dr. Seaborg. I never had the opportunity to meet him personally. Was he a –
Mr. Weaver: I just barely met him on a street; well, he spoke at a meeting.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. I understand he was a very gracious individual; that’s all I’ve heard about him, you know, that he was very personable, in spite of his notoriety, you might say. Well, there have been, like I say, tons of important people, and you’re in the list, I would say, and I’m afraid Oak Ridge National Laboratory – it used to be, I think, in the early days more renowned for its chemical prowess, and now it’s more – it’s still chemistry, but it’s more materials, you know what I mean? Metals & Ceramics Division is very, very big, and there’s always chemistry involved, you know, you can’t get away from chemistry, but the emphasis has shifted to developing new materials, material properties and all these different composites and what-have-you that they can do now. But there’s always chemistry background, no doubt about it.
Mr. Weaver: And then there’s the big computer programs.
Mr. Kolb: Oh computers, yes, of course, yeah, everything’s done by computers. Well I’m going to have to stop here because I have to leave in few minutes. I certainly enjoyed talking with you Dr. Weaver and –
Mr. Weaver: I’m not Dr.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, well okay, Master Weaver.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Remember when you went out to Grand Junction, or went out to Colorado?
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Why were you searching for mica In Colorado?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It was after retirement.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Weaver: Someway they got interested in – somebody discovered something was special about –
Mr. Kolb: About mica?
Mr. Weaver: – properties.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And they wanted a large quantity of mica?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And you mentioned seeing –
Mr. Kolb: And you knew about some mica.
Mr. Weaver: I mentioned that I thought I had seen something similar to what they were describing.
Mr. Kolb: Was that near Grand Junction?
Mr. Weaver: In Colorado National Monument near Grand Junction. Have you been there?
Mr. Kolb: I’ve been through there. I haven’t really stopped and spent much time, but I’ve been through that area, right. Did you find the mica that you were looking for?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Who went with you? It was about 1977.
Mr. Weaver: I’m trying to think of his name.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Was it Coleman?
Mr. Weaver: No. I think you know his daughter, too. She’s now in –
Mr. Kolb: An Oak Ridger person?
Mr. Weaver: – charge of a large area in Colorado on its environmental – well, the forest and things.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay.
Mr. Weaver: She lives on West Outer Drive or did live there.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Dale? Was it Virginia Dale?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mr. Weaver: You’ve met her.
Mr. Kolb: I know these names come and go.
Mr. Weaver: You were on the same plane trip.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Oh, it was on Outer Drive, the top of – not Michigan, but New York. Is it Kappelmann? No.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: No, we talked about Kappelmann.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It starts with K, though, Father. Marsha, Martha?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Kimmelman?
Mr. Weaver: No. Well, I brought some mica back, but it didn’t have anything to do with that.
Mr. Kolb: I see, anyway –
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t find a way.
Mr. Kolb: – you made an attempt to.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well Grand Junction is a beautiful area. I know that, what little exposure I’ve had of it. Well, as I say, I have to shut down now because I have to go to another meeting. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. You had an amazing career and Oak Ridge is lucky you got here. I’m glad you changed your mind or they changed their mind and didn’t ship you out when you wanted to stop your employment with Y-12. Thank you, Dr. Boyd.

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ORAL HISTORY OF BOYD SMITH WEAVER
With daughter Melissa Weaver
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
August 9, 2005
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Mr. Weaver let’s start out by asking you first how and why you first came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mr. Weaver: When I was working in the magnesium plant in Henderson, Nevada, the plant which produced the magnesium that was used to burn Berlin, a man from S-50 in Oak Ridge – I’ve forgotten what it was called – came to my lab out there to recruit people.
Mr. Kolb: Was that the thermal diffusion process, I believe, S-50?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. He told me it was a glorified laboratory. Well I accepted the job. When I got here, first I stayed in a hotel in Knoxville, my wife and I – got here early December, 1944.
Mr. Kolb: Did you drive or take a train?
Mr. Weaver: We drove by way of Grand Junction, Colorado, my hometown, and we had to stay in the hotel for five nights, I think. On Friday, I finally went to – no, on Monday – I got there on Sunday – on Monday, went out to S-50.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you came right out to the plant?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have clearance set up already for you to get in?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I had been an operator for several months. Well it was not a glorified laboratory. There were twenty-one towers for doing what, I did not know, and they did not tell me. In spite of my going to work in the Laboratory, they did not tell me. All I knew was that the material had a higher freezing point than its boiling point. I was not told what it was. I climbed a ladder to get to the top to take a sample and I lost a little out in the air, and I could see the result of its condensing in the air.
Mr. Kolb: So uranium oxide was floating around in the air?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. They did not tell me what it was.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever heard of the word Tuballoy used?
Mr. Weaver: No, not then. No, I don’t believe I did. I was not told anything about it. There was no laboratory that I could see. They may have had one somewhere else. And, as I say, I lost some out in the air.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t want to do that very often, right?
Mr. Weaver: We got there, into Knoxville, on Sunday night and went out Monday morning when I – on Friday morning I went in and [inaudible] as well. I guess it was on Friday that I was told where my furniture was.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, was moving in?
Mr. Weaver: And I went into the town for an interview, found that my furniture was in an Eastman Tennessee [Tennessee Eastman] house, it had come in the same truck as other people who were going to Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: Were you working for Tennessee Eastman at that point?
Mr. Weaver: No, for S-50, for those people.
Mr. Kolb: But who was the contactor that you worked for, do you remember?
Mr. Weaver: I’ve forgotten what the name of it was.
Mr. Kolb: But it wasn’t Tennessee Eastman.
Mr. Weaver: Some outfit in Ohio.
Mr. Kolb: So your furniture was all mixed up?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, my furniture was there. By that time, I was disgusted with them and I find that in order to get my furniture back I had to get a release from Tennessee Eastman. I decided I didn’t want a release. So I went in to interview for a job with them, [but] went back the next morning and told them I didn’t want to work for them. Well, the man who handled the money refused to pay for my hotel bill; I never did get it. They told me the day before that they had housing in South Harriman.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. And you said, “Where is that?” [laughter]
Mr. Weaver: I guess I even went out there; I’m not sure.
Mr. Kolb: And your wife, at this time, was staying in Knoxville?
Mr. Weaver: In the hotel.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of upsetting to say the least.
Mr. Weaver: Well, so the people at Y-12 – I didn’t know it was Y-12, but Tennessee Eastman – took me out. I guess they arranged for me a place to stay that night. Next morning I went out.
Mr. Kolb: Did you stay in the Alexander Inn by any chance or the Guest House?
Mr. Weaver: No, in Knoxville, the big hotel. What is it?
Mr. Kolb: UT uses it now. Andrew Johnson?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, Andrew Johnson Hotel, I’d forgotten. Well, so I guess it was on Monday we went – well I think we stayed at a house for a night or two. On Monday we came out here, and so we were put in a house – our furniture was in a house on Latimer Lane.
Mr. Kolb: They found your furniture and put it in Latimer Lane. Well, that’s an improvement.
Mr. Weaver: And very shortly, my wife decided she did not want to live there. On one morning, our heater had something wrong with it, and there was mud all around us; it was raining. We’d come from southern Nevada where it didn’t rain more than about once in six months.
Mr. Kolb: Totally different.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, but we stayed there a few days, and some way she got out and found a house in Inskip. She didn’t drive at that time; I don’t know how she did it.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe she got a bus?
Mr. Weaver: She had never driven.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe she got a bus over there, the bus service maybe.
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know how she got there. But anyway, we moved to Inskip, stayed there until the last day of ’45.
Mr. Kolb: Now were you working in the Y-12 plant then for Eastman?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, that’s when I was taken on. Then for about three weeks, I came out everyday on a bus to – not to Y-12, but to the place on Laboratory Road where they had lectures everyday on everything.
Mr. Kolb: Was that the ‘Castle on the Hill’ so-called?
Mr. Weaver: Well, no, the ‘Castle’ hadn’t been built yet.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, it hadn’t been built yet, oh, I see. Well someplace else near that.
Mr. Weaver: Just below the turnpike a little ways, there’s a yellow building, still there, that’s where I was for I think three weeks or so, waiting for my clearance, I was told.
Mr. Kolb: Is that the Tunnell Building, on the corner?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, that’s right. No, it wasn’t. I know where the Tunnell Building is – but south of there on Latimer Road, just on the bend – it’s still there. I went by it yesterday.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll have to check it out. They had, like, orientation talks there and that kind of thing?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and we were told a lot of things about security and safety and all that sort of stuff. Same woman, I think, made all the lectures. Along the way in, I noticed some equipment, and I heard all these things. I was wondering what it was all about.
Mr. Kolb: They didn’t tell you what you would be doing.
Mr. Weaver: No, but I guessed.
Mr. Kolb: You guessed?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. I wasn’t supposed to know; I wasn’t told. Well after three weeks or so of that –
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t know whether you guessed right or wrong did you?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, till a lot later.
Mr. Weaver: But someway there had been some news about a bomb, I think in the newspapers – well, about the possibility of using it. I knew it was – can be made an explosive. After three weeks, I was taken out to Y-12. What’s the name of the lawyer who was –
Mr. Kolb: Tunnell?
Mr. Weaver: No. I can’t think of his name.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Worthington?
Mr. Weaver: No. [possibly referring to an image] He took me out to Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: Gene Joyce took you out to Y-12?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, he was working –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, he was out there working?
Mr. Weaver: No, he was – for some reason he was in the same building I was in and I don’t know what he was doing. Yeah, Gene Joyce. I’ve met him since then.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, he passed away several years ago.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and he took me out there. I went in, went into a lab – my supervisor asked me whether I knew what they were doing. I told him I’d guessed. I’d guessed right.
Mr. Kolb: He told you, “You guessed right”?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, he told me.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Weaver: Of course, then I was supposed to know, at Y-12, because I couldn’t be doing any work without knowing what it was. It was the Uranium Lab.
Mr. Kolb: But did you use the word ‘Uranium’?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, well, not in public.
Mr. Kolb: Right, okay.
Mr. Weaver: I was told it was Tuballoy for anybody else. So I was introduced to it.
Mr. Kolb: who was your first supervisor then at Y-12?
Mr. Weaver: I’ve forgotten his name – oh, Getter. He was a twenty-four-year-old from a University in California – and I can’t think now – it was one in northern California somewhere. I was thirty-four and he was twenty-four.
Mr. Kolb: Did he have a Ph.D. like you did?
Mr. Weaver: I think he did. I didn’t have a Ph.D.; I had a Masters from the University of Chicago. I don’t know where his Ph.D. was from.
Mr. Kolb: Do you remember anybody else you worked with then, initially, in that laboratory?
Mr. Weaver: I can’t think of any names now.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know Bill Wilcox?
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t meet Bill until later, but on the way going into Y-12, I met Jeanie.
Mr. Kolb: Jeanie Wilcox.
Mr. Weaver: For some reason, I knew her name. She must have told me on the way in, but she was a guard at the gate.
Mr. Kolb: She was?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Was she married to Bill then already or not?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, I knew her name. So I met her first and knew her name.
Mr. Kolb: And she was a guard.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. I didn’t realize that. So did you spend the rest of the war years at Y-12 then?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. Well, it was less than a year left.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What did you do, Father?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, what did you actually do?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What was your position?
Mr. Kolb: What was your position? Did you analyze?
Mr. Weaver: I was a chemist. I wasn’t an analyst but I did work with uranium on processes. In fact, in the first – most the work in the beginning was on recovering uranium from, well, from waste more than anything else.
Mr. Kolb: Other materials, right.
Mr. Weaver: From the calutron separation.
Mr. Kolb: Every little microgram counted.
Mr. Weaver: Yes. Yeah, well, at those lectures in the beginning, we’ve been told that the material was so valuable that they had to scrub the floors to get whatever mud had been released and to process that to get the product, though I wasn’t told what it was. That’s part of the reason I guessed, that there couldn’t be anything more valuable than uranium-235.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, let’s go back to your living conditions. Were you still living in Inskip, Knoxville during this time?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, until the last day of 1945, when we moved to Dixie Lane.
Mr. Kolb: After the war ended?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Last day of ’45 – you said that, yeah. Okay, and during those war years did you take a bus to work every day from Inskip? Is that the way you got back and forth?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and my wife started working there in the Spring, so she rode the bus to Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: So you could ride to work together, kind of, at least till you got to the Y-12 site?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, well, I was in a riding pool for a good part of the time.
Mr. Kolb: That’s some other people that were going to the same place, kind of?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: When you lived in Inskip and you were not a local Tennessean, you didn’t have a Tennessee accent, if there is such a thing, how did you get along with the other people around you that were natives, so to speak?
Mr. Weaver: It didn’t make any difference.
Mr. Kolb: Had no problem?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Good. They accepted you, and, of course, I guess there were a lot of other –
Mr. Weaver: Oh, yes, they were from all over.
Mr. Kolb: – visitors from all over staying wherever they could get rental property, I guess.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: When you went to St. James Episcopal Church, Father?
Mr. Weaver: No, I went to the Presbyterian Church in Fountain City most of the time. Though I remember, when we went to St. James – well, my older daughter was born during that time. My wife quit working with that and when Cynthia was six weeks old, I remember we went to St. Stephen’s, or, rather, to St. James.
Mr. Kolb: Episcopal Church?
Mr. Weaver: Episcopal Church.
Mr. Kolb: Is that in the Inskip area? I’m not familiar with where that is.
Mr. Weaver: No, it’s on North Broadway.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, I think I know where it is. It’s an old church, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: John Bull was the minister. Was John Bull minister then, Father?
Mr. Weaver: No, John was – well, he became minister there, but he was working at K-25.
Mr. Kolb: John Bull?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And he became a minister?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, yeah that’s right, not until later. But he was living in Oak Ridge, I think, in ’45 anyway. He quit to go to seminary.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see, after the war, probably.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t have to deal as much with the muddy conditions in Oak Ridge, once you were living in Inskip, you had normal paved roads to go over and that sort of thing. But I guess when you came into town you had –
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, well, the road there was paved but there was mud all around.
Mr. Kolb: It’s interesting that you’re one of the few people – there are several other people I’ve talked to – that guessed what the project was, even though they didn’t know for sure.
Mr. Weaver: Some others guessed too.
Mr. Kolb: And they didn’t know until the actual bomb was dropped and they were confirmed, but –
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, but of course I knew it as soon as I got to the Lab.
Mr. Kolb: I often wondered about that, how could chemists not know what they were working with, because they had to deal with the physical properties to some extent, into chemistry of uranium, so I just never could understand how they would not know. They figured it out for themselves. But I was always told you were never supposed to discuss your work, and I guess you didn’t, except at the plant when you were in there.
Mr. Weaver: No, the chemists were told, but probably not – some people that worked – the helpers, technicians might not have known.
Mr. Kolb: And you didn’t discuss uranium in front of them, I assume.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: So what were you doing? What procedures and how did you go about developing procedures, Father?
Mr. Kolb: How did you develop the procedures that you used, the analytical procedures?
Mr. Weaver: I can’t say I developed – I didn’t develop them.
Mr. Kolb: But they were there?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But you were refining them weren’t you, refining the procedures?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Did you refine them any or improve them?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Where did these procedures come from that you followed? Who developed them?
Mr. Weaver: No, they were mostly solvent extraction.
Mr. Kolb: Solvent extraction had already been developed prior to that.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know when that started. I guess you spent a lot of time and effort reclaiming everything and processing the residues.
Mr. Weaver: Of course I didn’t actually do a lot of that, because I worked on –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, but that was an emphasis, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What equipment was used, Father?
Mr. Weaver: Ordinary laboratory equipment.
Mr. Kolb: And ‘solvent extraction columns,’ they call it.
Mr. Weaver: No, I didn’t have columns then, but I did later. Separation – well, but they didn’t have those until I was using them on rare earth instead of uranium.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well it all worked out pretty well, although there was a lot of tension as to getting enough material for a bomb and, as I understand it, General Groves was not happy for a long time until the production of Y-12 really wrapped up, so to speak, sometime in ’45, when they knew we’d have enough material to get a bomb made. Towards the end of the war before the bomb was dropped, was there any discussion about production and how things were going in the production of uranium with the calutrons? Any discussion of that with the staff?
Mr. Weaver: Not to my knowledge, no.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Was there any safety equipment provided to you?
Mr. Kolb: What about safety?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Exposure prevention?
Mr. Kolb: Safety equipment for your exposure to uranium or anything else?
Mr. Weaver: No, I don’t think so.
Mr. Kolb: Of course, it was not a hazard; just didn’t want to ingest it, of course.
Mr. Weaver: No, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: How many people were in your lab?
Mr. Kolb: How many people were in your lab, about? Fifty, a hundred?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, no.
Mr. Kolb: Smaller number? Twenty, maybe?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I think I eventually had my own lab. No, there were only a few of us.
Mr. Kolb: But can you remember any other –
Mr. Weaver: I was in 9731-3, I think.
Mr. Kolb: 9731-3 Building?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I think so.
Mr. Kolb: Can you remember any –
Mr. Weaver: Oh and I – well, that’s right, I knew about the calutron, the experimental calutron in 9731.
Mr. Kolb: An experimental calutron.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Was this a –
Mr. Weaver: There were calutrons, two calutrons in the 9731 building.
Mr. Kolb: You say ‘experimental.’ Were they different than the main –
Mr. Weaver: No, I think the reason for it was to – you could produce a small amount – but mostly to – it was a pilot plant, and it had calutrons.
Mr. Kolb: It was a pilot plant.
Mr. Weaver: Two units of two different – twenty-four inch and forty-eight inch, both, diameter.
Mr. Kolb: And they were run before the main calutrons came into –
Mr. Weaver: Yes. As they were being built.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, it was an early experience with the process?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I heard about that. I didn’t realize – I thought that had all happened earlier than ’44, but I didn’t know. So they were the pilot plant. And you were probably getting material from those pilot plant calutrons.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see. Okay, Boyd, how did you find out that the bomb was dropped? It was publicly announced by President Truman that we’d used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. How did you first hear about that? Were you at work?
Mr. Weaver: I was at work.
Mr. Kolb: You were at work?
Mr. Weaver: And the word came – everybody heard about it.
Mr. Kolb: Once it came, it spread like wildfire, as they say.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I see, but you and some others knew about it already, so you just – it was a matter of time before – of course no one knew how well the bomb was going to work or anything like that. So, the people you worked with, how did they react, that didn’t know about it before hand? Did they all go “hunh”?
Mr. Weaver: Well I guess they were surprised.
Mr. Kolb: Did they continue their job that day or what happened?
Mr. Weaver: Well, most of the people around stayed here, but –
Mr. Kolb: I mean the actual day of the announcement.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: How did they [react]? Did they continue working or did you just – what happened?
Mr. Weaver: Well, there probably was a lot of discussion for a while but –
Mr. Kolb: Was there any partying?
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t see anybody leaving.
Mr. Kolb: I see, okay.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Father was it all produced by the Labs or did it come from Knoxville. What was the source of news?
Mr. Kolb: How did you get your news back then? Did it come from Knoxville or how?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Of course, there was radio.
Mr. Weaver: No, I didn’t have a –
Mr. Kolb: Did you have a radio?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t believe I had a radio then.
Mr. Kolb: Were there local newspapers you could read.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. Of course, I was living in –
Mr. Kolb: Inskip.
Mr. Weaver: Inskip.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: How did you keep up with the news from the War, about the War?
Mr. Kolb: How did you find out about the news of the War?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, well, I did take a newspaper when I lived in – I think when – or at least after I got out of here. That’s before I came out here.
Mr. Kolb: A Knoxville newspaper.
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And so there was general news available. I think there was an Oak Ridge paper put out by the Army also. Did you get that too?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: I guess that was more for the residents living inside of Oak Ridge. Okay, and your wife worked at Y-12 also, you said.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And what did she do? What kind of job did she have?
Mr. Weaver: I think it was a secretarial job of some kind.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Mother later told me that she was in charge of filing.
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: She did not understand the system. [laughter]
Mr. Weaver: And I never told her what we were doing.
Mr. Kolb: Right, well you weren’t –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: She said there were copies and copies and copies of everything.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, yeah, sure. Good old carbon copies back then.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: [inaudible] filing.
Mr. Kolb: Now she did not know what was going on. How did she react?
Mr. Weaver: I guess I must have mentioned some chemical we used. She used the word there, talking with someone, and was warned that she shouldn’t even mention that; it wasn’t uranium.
Mr. Kolb: But something related.
Mr. Weaver: Just some chemical; I’ve forgotten what it was, a solvent or something.
Mr. Kolb: How did she react when she heard the news of the dropping of the bomb?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: You weren’t there, I guess, but when you got back together back home did you talk about it some?
Mr. Weaver: Not much.
Mr. Kolb: Did you tell her that you already knew about the uranium project?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I guess so.
Mr. Kolb: You could talk about it openly then, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well it was an exciting time. Of course, during that time they were still building Oak Ridge, basically.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you saw that process going on too, the construction of this and that and the other thing. How did that strike you?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Just a lot of activity right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have an occasion to use the hospital facilities or the doctors in Oak Ridge, or did you have to do that?
Mr. Weaver: Not right away, no.
Mr. Kolb: Not right away, till you moved.
Mr. Weaver: Of course, we were still living in Inskip when Cynthia was born, so we used St. Mary’s Hospital.
Mr. Kolb: What year was that, about?
Mr. Weaver: 1945.
Mr. Kolb: 1945, that’s you.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: No, August 1945, my older sister Cynthia.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, your older – I’m sorry, you’re Melissa, I’m sorry, got confused. So when did you move?
Mr. Weaver: So, Caroline worked for only a short time.
Mr. Kolb: I see, until she got pregnant and had to stop, yeah. So when did you move into Oak Ridge, you told me already. I’ve forgotten.
Mr. Weaver: The last day of 1945.
Mr. Kolb: The last day of ’45, okay, and you moved into what?
Mr. Weaver: 110 Dixie Lane.
Mr. Kolb: 110 Dixie Lane. Was this a cemesto house?
Mr. Weaver: It’s a “B” house, yes.
Mr. Kolb: A “B” house, okay and had, what, two bedrooms?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Probably? Was the street paved then or gravel?
Mr. Weaver: It was at least gravel.
Mr. Kolb: The mud problem was not as bad?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, no.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It’s on the top of ridge. It’s better.
Mr. Kolb: Right, I remember roughly where it is, yeah. So you became a part of the early Oak Ridge, then. And you had one child at that time?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: When you moved back to Oak Ridge? And what church did you attend then? Did you have an Episcopal church that you attended then, or how did that work?
Mr. Weaver: The Rector of St. Stephen’s lived in 102 Dixie Lane.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: That was the Rectory for many years.
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Who was the Rector, Father?
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t Pollard, was it?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: McGregor.
Mr. Kolb: McGregor?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Was it McGregor?
Mr. Kolb: Was it McGregor?
Mr. Weaver: No, not until later.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay. If it doesn’t come to you, that’s all right. And was St. Stephen’s where it is now located?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: They had a temporary –
Mr. Weaver: Oh, we met at –
Mr. Kolb: Chapel on the Hill?
Mr. Weaver: At Chapel on the Hill at five o’clock on Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Kolb: P.M., I see, okay. You were one of the later churches? Okay, I see.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It was Saturday or Sunday, five p.m., Father?
Mr. Kolb: Was it on Sunday at five o’clock?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get involved with any of the other earlier organizations at that time when Oak Ridge was getting formed up, you might say?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Well, tell him more about how St. Stephen’s evolved. He was one of the founders.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, tell us about how the church St. Stephen’s evolved, because you were an early member, right?
Mr. Weaver: Well, I really wasn’t a member. I was still a Presbyterian, but because I was near the Rector, I talked with him, and they called on me to teach a class of –
Mr. Kolb: Adult class?
Mr. Weaver: – of boys, fourth to sixth graders, even though I wasn’t a member, but because I lived near the Rector I was –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But also, Father, I think because of your background as a child who was brought up in the Church of the Brethren – so he was very well-versed in the Bible. His grandfather was a minister.
Mr. Kolb: And you also had taught school earlier for a while, too, so you had a teaching experience there. So you got involved in their Sunday School Program, so to speak, I guess?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And mother was Anglican.
Mr. Weaver: So that spring, that was the first of the Sunday School.
Mr. Kolb: Where did they have Sunday School classes? I mean you couldn’t meet at the Chapel on the Hill. Did you have to have some other building?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Did they meet at the Rectory?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, no, at the Rectory.
Mr. Kolb: At the Rectory. And where was that located?
Mr. Weaver: 102 Dixie Lane. As I said, I lived right next to them, and Carolyn got acquainted with them, and that way I got drawn in.
Mr. Kolb: That’s where the priest lived, and that was the Rectory.
Mr. Weaver: I was invited to a meeting, didn’t know what it was about, but it was to organize the Sunday School, and I was appointed a teacher.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Was it Dandridge, father? Dandridge?
Mr. Weaver: No, he was Bishop.
Mr. Kolb: The name of the Bishop was Dandridge?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, I think Dandridge was the Bishop at that time. But my class met that spring out under a tree on the lawn. We had a meeting first, worship meeting, and then I took my class outside. Fortunately, it did not rain that spring.
Mr. Kolb: You were fortunate. Is that because there wasn’t enough room in the building or you just liked –
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, there wasn’t enough room. As I remember, there were a total of eighty children. The next fall, we had a Sunday school in the High School and congregation met in the –
Mr. Kolb: In the gymnasium, maybe?
Mr. Weaver: Gymnasium.
Mr. Kolb: Of the High School?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I see. So the schools rented the space out for organizations like the churches?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that. Okay, interesting.
Mr. Weaver: In fact, I think that was – I’m not sure if it was ten or eleven, but anyway, another congregation met an hour before or after that.
Mr. Kolb: So did you outgrow the Chapel on the Hill? Is that why you moved to the High School?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, I guess so.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: I know they were still there in 1949, because I was baptized under the basket.
Mr. Kolb: So when did they move from the High School to the present location? I guess that’s where they built their permanent facility, where the present church is?
Mr. Weaver: Well, as soon as it was built.
Mr. Kolb: But you don’t recall the date exactly?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Because Tommy was born in August ’51 and he was baptized in the new church.
Mr. Kolb: Did you continue teaching Sunday school for a long time with St. Stephen’s?
Mr. Weaver: No, just those two – well, one spring and the next year.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Mr. Weaver: And then I was appointed Registrar of the Sunday School and continued to be Registrar for forty-five years.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness sakes. Take care of all the records, attendance records?
Mr. Weaver: Until ’91 when my sight got too poor.
Mr. Kolb: Wow. That’s a long, long, long service you put in there. Did your wife – was she involved with the Sunday school?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, yes, she had a class for a while, later.
Mr. Kolb: You mentioned that when you were a child, your family was a member of the Church of the Brethren, I think you said, and that was out in the West, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and when I was in Anderson, Indiana, I joined the Presbyterian Church.
Mr. Kolb: And then you became Episcopal. But your mother was a member of the Anglican Church?
Mr. Weaver: My mother? No, she was a Methodist.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, maybe it was your wife.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, my wife was an Episcopalian.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so that’s sort of why you leaned toward Episcopalian. Did you know Dr. Pollard through the church?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: St. Stephens.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, and I was elected to the vestry of St. Stephens six days before I was confirmed.
Mr. Kolb: [laughter] That’s some kind of a record!
Mr. Weaver: And that Sunday I was – the meeting was on Monday night – the next Sunday, I was confirmed.
Mr. Kolb: Is that legal – to not be a member, and be a member of the vestry? [laughter] I guess they were glad to have you.
Mr. Weaver: I had been nominated a year before that. The congregation was told that I was not eligible.
Mr. Kolb: Okay Boyd, very interesting. You’ve got so many things to keep up with here. Would you say that St. Stephen’s Church was one of the main activities that you took part in, obviously, you and your wife teaching and that sort of thing and becoming the Registrar? Did you involve yourself in any other of the civic organizations or what have you back then? You were pretty busy raising babies, too.
Mr. Weaver: Not civic, but there was the American Chemical Society. Of course, I went to all the meetings in the plant. And I had a projector which I took home all the time when I went to meetings.
Mr. Kolb: That was more rare back in those days, probably, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Well ALSO is part of the church.
Mr. Weaver: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, your church delivered meals to indigent families?
Mr. Weaver: Yes, on Christmas and Easter and they still do it.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But back then, we would deliver them to the houses. I remember getting in the car with you, Father, and taking boxes of food and going into shacks.
Mr. Weaver: Now they have to come to the church.
Mr. Kolb: But back then you delivered them right to their homes?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And this was people living how far away? Up in Wartburg area?
Mr. Weaver: No, North Clinton quite a ways. I went once, anyway.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: We also went to a place between here and Oliver Springs. Did we go to Windrock?
Mr. Kolb: Windrock?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: How about Briceville? That’s up in the hills north of here.
Mr. Weaver: No didn’t go to Briceville.
Mr. Kolb: There are plenty of underprivileged families around, didn’t have to go very far, I know, yeah. So your church had a mission to – the food preparation.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, we got our list from the –
Mr. Kolb: The County maybe?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: Let’s talk about your experience with the Oak Ridge Schools. Your daughters grew up and your son – you had a son and two daughters, right? Which school did they attend? Elementary school, that is.
Mr. Weaver: They started at – right down here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, that would be –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Elm Grove.
Mr. Kolb: Elm Grove?
Mr. Weaver: Elm Grove.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: We would walk across Florida Avenue and down either East Fernhill Road or East Faunce Road through the woods then to the school.
Mr. Kolb: Was that on boardwalks that were built?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: No, just children’s trails through the woods.
Mr. Kolb: Trails you made just by going, traffic. Okay.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And then we went to Jefferson Junior, and we would walk along a trail between Florida Avenue and Georgia through the woods.
Mr. Kolb: Where was Jefferson Junior then? Was it the same location it is now?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Jefferson Junior was where the High School had been, on Blankenship.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And we went to Jefferson through ninth grade and then attended the High School building where it is now, on Providence Road.
Mr. Kolb: But going back to your elementary school days, did you interact with teachers much? And tell me about what you thought about the education your children got back then.
Mr. Weaver: Well we got acquainted with some of the teachers.
Mr. Kolb: Remember any of their names offhand?
Mr. Weaver: I can’t think of any really.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Oh Father, the name of the teacher who came in from Oliver Springs, what was her name? Worthington? Williams?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: She was marvelous.
Mr. Kolb: You were in her class?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: I’m trying to think.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I just wondered, yeah, anyway.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But we went up to her old country house in Petros. Did she live in Oak Ridge? Yes, I think she had a place here – that was her family home, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: She died just a few years – she lived to be in her nineties.
Mr. Kolb: But your kids did a lot of activity, I’m sure, through the schools. Were they active in any sports? Did they play basketball or whatever? Do you remember?
Mr. Weaver: Thomas played tennis.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good. Well my son, Tom, played tennis too.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, and played tennis in college.
Mr. Kolb: And they had a tennis team even back then? That’s interesting.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Well that would have been in the mid ’60s.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that was a lot later, right, I understand, when he got to high school. Tell us about Dr. Willard. Was he a visiting scientist or what?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. He was a professor, head of Analytical Chemistry at University of Ohio.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Michigan.
Mr. Weaver: Michigan, yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Ann Arbor. What was Dr. Willard’s first name? Hobart?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Hobart, okay. How did you first meet him? Was he a consultant here?
Mr. Weaver: Oh –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It’s a good story.
Mr. Weaver: I met him at a –
Mr. Kolb: American Chemical Society?
Mr. Weaver: Chemical Society meeting in Evanston, Illinois.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What year?
Mr. Weaver: I’ve forgotten. And he told me that he was going to come down here – been invited to come down for the summer.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they had visiting –
Mr. Weaver: That’s why I got acquainted with him.
Mr. Kolb: And he worked with your group? Consulted with your group basically?
Mr. Weaver: Well, with analytical labs in both Y-12 and K-25.
Mr. Kolb: I see, okay.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: But didn’t he overhear you once? Where was that, in Chicago? You were talking with somebody and they asked you about a procedure. You told me this story, I think, where he overheard you giving recommendation on how to extract or purify something and he overheard you in the next room.
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know about that.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: This was before you met him.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Were you in Akron, I mean in Barberton?
Mr. Weaver: That must have been the meeting at Evanston, then.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, it was Illinois?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What year was that? Was that when you were still working on your Master’s in Chicago?
Mr. Weaver: Oh no, it was after I came here.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Oh.
Mr. Weaver: Quite a while after I came here.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Master’s was ’36.
Mr. Kolb: So Dr. Willard was one of several visiting chemists that consulted with your laboratory?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah and then the Willards spent a summer here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Weaver: He had two daughters.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Nancy and – I’ve forgotten the other name.
Mr. Kolb: Were they friends of you and your sister?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: They were older, but she’s now a Vassar professor. He would come for dinner when he came to visit?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He would stay at the Alexander Inn, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And he would come to the house for dinner, and he was vegetarian, so we had spinach soufflé that mother made.
Mr. Kolb: [laughter] Special entrees.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: You remember those lovely evenings, Father? He would let us play the piano for him.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. He was a lucky man.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He was a really lovely man.
Mr. Kolb: He was from Ohio?
Mr. Weaver: No, no, Michigan.
Mr. Kolb: Michigan, you said, Michigan.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He was the author of the text, wasn’t he?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: For Analytical Chemistry.
Mr. Kolb: Oh my, so he was rather prominent in that field.
Mr. Weaver: And we visited him in Los Alamos.
Mr. Kolb: Did he work in the Project, in the Manhattan Project?
Mr. Weaver: He was out there for a summer, I think.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Just a summer.
Mr. Weaver: He had told me here – once when he visited my lab – he told me he was going out there and invited me to stop and see them and we did on our trip to Colorado and then back by way of New Mexico.
Mr. Kolb: What year was this approximately? Do you remember? Was it in the ’50s or ’60s?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: About 1960, would you say, Father?
Mr. Weaver: ’51 maybe.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: No, I was older, wasn’t I?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, yeah, yes you were, that’s right. Oh, it couldn’t have been then; it had to be later.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Late ’50s.
Mr. Kolb: Late ’50s or early ’60s, okay.
Mr. Weaver: With all three of you children.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It was late ’50s, I think.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, because you remember it, yeah. Well there were a lot of – a lot of interesting people came here and stayed. Some of them just consulted.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Tell him about the visiting Russians.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, what about the Russians that visited? Were there chemists from Russia [that] came over here?
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t know them.
Mr. Kolb: Did they visit your lab or some of the people you knew?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: In the ’60s? You [inaudible] copyrights.
Mr. Kolb: What about the Russians and copyright?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: One of your articles you found in a Russian journal? It was translated to Russian?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t remember it.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well that’s okay. You published in various journals, I assume. American Chemical Society journal, probably?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a long career in – oh, you went into stable isotopes as I recall –
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: – after the war.
Mr. Weaver: I had charge of the chemistry in Stable Isotopes, starting in ’46.
Mr. Kolb: Was Dr. Keim involved in that too?
Mr. Weaver: He was my boss.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and did you know Grady Whitman by any chance? I think he worked –
Mr. Weaver: The name is familiar, but I’m not sure I –
Mr. Kolb: He was an engineer and he worked in that program, probably little different area. So you went through the periodic table, as I recall, in that program?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, sixty elements. The gaseous elements, of course, were not separated by calutrons but by other means, and I didn’t have anything to do with that. But all the things that I was in charge of, the chemistry and the supplying of food material and taking care of all the products.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t want to mess that up after spending all the time.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, I had a group I’d developed, decided on the processes for developing all the –
Mr. Kolb: Okay, was that similar to the uranium chemistry kind of work or did you have to develop new techniques?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. There were things that were known, but we still had to apply them.
Mr. Kolb: And a wide range of chemistry, over sixty elements, rare earths and everything else, yeah. How long did that program operate approximately? It started in the – was in the late ’40s, after the war?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And then it ran for how long, do you remember, approximately?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, I’m not sure just when it quit – just a few years ago. They had [inaudible] elements that they worked on.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a lot of stable isotope chemistry in your work here. Did you retire on that program, or did you move on to something else beyond the Stable Isotopes Program?
Mr. Weaver: Oh, no, I moved on to Chemical Technology.
Mr. Kolb: And you went to – did you work in X-10 then?
Mr. Weaver: I moved to – yes. Well, Chem Tech took over Stable Isotopes, when I was out of that building. Keim decided – well, actually, he had somebody else who needed the job, whom he wanted to favor, gave him my job while I still worked on rare earth separation. I had – in the same room as Stable Isotopes, or the same building – I had eighty-five stages of separation for rare earths. I was doing that while I –
[break in recording]
Mr. Weaver: That’s that.
Mr. Kolb: One of your papers was in a text here your daughter just gave me. “Liquid extraction of rare earths.”
Mr. Weaver: Oh.
Mr. Kolb: And this is from – right. So you had a long career in rare earth extraction.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Amazing. Did you – did he work in that program or he worked in early chemical –
Mr. Weaver: No, he was at somewhere, X-10. I don’t know what he did.
Mr. Kolb: I think he did some of the fission product chemistry or something like that. So, Dr. Stoughton, he died probably at least five years ago. I know his son is a classmate with my son. Bob is his name, or Robert Stoughton, and they’re good friends. Bob –
[break in recording]
Ms. Melissa Weaver: – shoot, name. She is now living with her son out West. She’s the journalist, he was the chemist, oh, you know them. Father was a team leader.
Mr. Kolb: And somebody got killed in an avalanche out west, skiing?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Mountain climbing.
Mr. Kolb: Mountain climbing, okay, thank you.
Mr. Weaver: Now I can’t think of their name. He spent a summer with me.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: His father’s name was George?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Starts with A.
Mr. Weaver: Well, and, of course, I knew his mother, and still know her, see her at concerts. [Editor’s note: June Adamson]
Mr. Kolb: Did you know S. C. Lind? The Scarboro technician, I guess it was?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: I think he worked at X-10 also, probably, yeah.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Lived up on East Drive.
Mr. Kolb: Well, there’s so many names, it’s hard to remember when you don’t use them. I have the same problem. It’s just one of those things, getting older. Okay, well, what do you think about living in Oak Ridge over the years? Have you enjoyed it? What do you think of Oak Ridge as a community?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, it’s been a good place to live.
Mr. Kolb: Good place to live? I know your family was involved in lot of the earlier work efforts to help the surrounding communities and that sort of thing, but a lot of people that I talk to that have lived here their adult life, they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Would you agree with that? No reason to leave, in other words?
Mr. Weaver: No reason to leave.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you retired in 1975, is that right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah. My official retirement date was ’75, but I stayed on for about two years more in the lab, and then got a job with SAIC for a while.
Mr. Kolb: Was it a part-time job, or full-time?
Mr. Weaver: No, it was part-time.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Contract.
Mr. Kolb: Sort of like a consultant, right. But you never thought about moving anywhere else.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Had your roots pretty much established here, yeah, that’s good. Any other anecdotes you might remember about your life here that you might want to contribute, that you might think were important? I know that a lot of things happened over the years.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Can you talk about Fred Kappelmann?
Mr. Weaver: He was one of my group in Stable Isotopes, and Coleman was my boss for a while in Chem Tech.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Then, Virginia Coleman worked for you.
Mr. Weaver: Yes, that’s right, Virginia worked for me way back for a short time in ’45.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know Fred Kappelmann personally, but I knew of him at the Lab, at Chem Tech. Is he still alive, do you know?
Mr. Weaver: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know either.
Mr. Weaver: Haven’t heard from him for a while.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Who were the families who lived on Dixie Lane with us, do you remember? That was quite a group that lasted for quite a while, even though we only lived there for two years. No, more than that. ’46 to ’59?
Mr. Weaver: Well the Bayeses lived on –
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Charlie and Julie Bayes?
Mr. Kolb: He’s a chemist also, isn’t he?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I think he’s still around.
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I’m not sure, but I think he is.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Julie died last year, or this year.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, but Charlie is still around, yeah, I see him once in a while.
Mr. Weaver: Well Charlie went with us when we went out to the Stiefs’ out near Kingston.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Stanley and Velma Stief.
Mr. Weaver: Their daughter and her family live out there. Well, her daughter and son both live out on the way to Kingston, and they lived across the street from us on Dixie Lane.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Remember the evenings when the Dixie Lane people would get together? Even after we moved here, to Fernhill?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Sort of a neighborhood association, just informal, kind of?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And to this day, we keep – we don’t see each other very often, but we keep track of each other.
Mr. Weaver: Well, and the women met here evenings for a card game.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And there would be birthday parties for the children.
Mr. Kolb: The change is something, a little bit – I see you and your daughter at the Playhouse quite a bit. You’ve been going to the Playhouse a long time?
Mr. Weaver: For a long while.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Father doesn’t go anymore because he can’t see or hear.
Mr. Weaver: Oh, in fact, when the Playhouse had Our Town, I was the undertaker [Joe Stoddard] in the play.
Mr. Kolb: You were? Were you successful? Good. So you had a little acting career too. Did Paul Ebert recruit you for that role?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He was a natural.
Mr. Kolb: Oh is that right? Did you use your chemistry on people? I’m just kidding.
Mr. Weaver: I had a few lines to say.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well certainly. That was a big cast as I recall in Our Town, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And you’ve attended the concerts all along, haven’t you, Father?
Mr. Kolb: The Oak Ridge Symphony? Oak Ridge is a wonderful arts community. That’s one of the unique features.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Talk about the Art Center and Mother’s role.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Ewing, talk about Ewing.
Mr. Kolb: Bruce Ewing from UT?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Buck Ewing.
Mr. Kolb: Buck Ewing, I’m sorry.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Buck Ewing and Charles Counts? Mother knew him.
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: These are people Mother knew.
Mr. Kolb: Your mother was an artist – well, your wife was an artist.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah, she was Director of the Art Center for three years.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And volunteered before that.
Mr. Weaver: Well, and she got a degree in Fine Arts when she was sixty years old.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, at UT?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Was Ewing involved in that, Dr. Ewing?
Mr. Weaver: Yes. Yeah, he was her major professor.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: He taught classes out here at the Art Center as well. She helped establish the Art Center. It was first up in the buildings at the top of Delaware, near the water tower.
Mr. Kolb: They have their own facility now, right?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Yeah, she was instrumental in the building and establishment of that building.
Mr. Kolb: I see, well, all these institutions needed their pioneers, so to speak. They wouldn’t be here without them. Yeah, that’s wonderful. Well you’ve had a great career and your daughter has showed me a lot of your publications that have contributed a lot to the science of chemistry and all, and it’s amazing now how we – the building blocks are always important, you know. People have to learn from the past. Well, any other comments you want to make before we wrap it up, Boyd? I don’t want to wear you out here. You’ve done a lot of recollecting. You want to tell us more about the Stable [Isotope Program] –
Mr. Weaver: Someway I got acquainted with a man at Argonne who was then at the University of Chicago, on the campus, and I went up to see him about rare earth separation. Now I can’t think of his name.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mr. Weaver: I also visited him at Arc after he moved out to Argonne, visited him there, and he had solvent extraction, several stages.
Mr. Kolb: But he was just duplicating work that had already been done here, right?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Basically, I would assume, yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: What year was that, Father?
Mr. Weaver: I’ve forgotten.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: When, about?
Mr. Kolb: In the ’60s, maybe? It’s okay, probably in the ’60s, you think?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: When did you meet Seaborg?
Mr. Kolb: When did you meet Dr. Seaborg?
Mr. Weaver: I met him –
Mr. Kolb: Because he was here during the War years.
Mr. Weaver: I met him at a meeting in Chicago.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ACS meeting?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: After the War?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: It was after the War?
Mr. Weaver: Oh yes, quite a while after.
Mr. Kolb: But he was here doing plutonium chemistry.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t he? I thought he was.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: No, I’m sorry. He did that in Chicago, I believe, yeah, but I thought he was also here. Tell me about what you thought of Dr. Seaborg. I never had the opportunity to meet him personally. Was he a –
Mr. Weaver: I just barely met him on a street; well, he spoke at a meeting.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. I understand he was a very gracious individual; that’s all I’ve heard about him, you know, that he was very personable, in spite of his notoriety, you might say. Well, there have been, like I say, tons of important people, and you’re in the list, I would say, and I’m afraid Oak Ridge National Laboratory – it used to be, I think, in the early days more renowned for its chemical prowess, and now it’s more – it’s still chemistry, but it’s more materials, you know what I mean? Metals & Ceramics Division is very, very big, and there’s always chemistry involved, you know, you can’t get away from chemistry, but the emphasis has shifted to developing new materials, material properties and all these different composites and what-have-you that they can do now. But there’s always chemistry background, no doubt about it.
Mr. Weaver: And then there’s the big computer programs.
Mr. Kolb: Oh computers, yes, of course, yeah, everything’s done by computers. Well I’m going to have to stop here because I have to leave in few minutes. I certainly enjoyed talking with you Dr. Weaver and –
Mr. Weaver: I’m not Dr.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, well okay, Master Weaver.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Remember when you went out to Grand Junction, or went out to Colorado?
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Why were you searching for mica In Colorado?
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It was after retirement.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Weaver: Someway they got interested in – somebody discovered something was special about –
Mr. Kolb: About mica?
Mr. Weaver: – properties.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And they wanted a large quantity of mica?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: And you mentioned seeing –
Mr. Kolb: And you knew about some mica.
Mr. Weaver: I mentioned that I thought I had seen something similar to what they were describing.
Mr. Kolb: Was that near Grand Junction?
Mr. Weaver: In Colorado National Monument near Grand Junction. Have you been there?
Mr. Kolb: I’ve been through there. I haven’t really stopped and spent much time, but I’ve been through that area, right. Did you find the mica that you were looking for?
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Who went with you? It was about 1977.
Mr. Weaver: I’m trying to think of his name.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Was it Coleman?
Mr. Weaver: No. I think you know his daughter, too. She’s now in –
Mr. Kolb: An Oak Ridger person?
Mr. Weaver: – charge of a large area in Colorado on its environmental – well, the forest and things.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay.
Mr. Weaver: She lives on West Outer Drive or did live there.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Dale? Was it Virginia Dale?
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mr. Weaver: You’ve met her.
Mr. Kolb: I know these names come and go.
Mr. Weaver: You were on the same plane trip.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Oh, it was on Outer Drive, the top of – not Michigan, but New York. Is it Kappelmann? No.
Mr. Weaver: No.
Mr. Kolb: No, we talked about Kappelmann.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: It starts with K, though, Father. Marsha, Martha?
Mr. Weaver: Yes.
Ms. Melissa Weaver: Kimmelman?
Mr. Weaver: No. Well, I brought some mica back, but it didn’t have anything to do with that.
Mr. Kolb: I see, anyway –
Mr. Weaver: I didn’t find a way.
Mr. Kolb: – you made an attempt to.
Mr. Weaver: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well Grand Junction is a beautiful area. I know that, what little exposure I’ve had of it. Well, as I say, I have to shut down now because I have to go to another meeting. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. You had an amazing career and Oak Ridge is lucky you got here. I’m glad you changed your mind or they changed their mind and didn’t ship you out when you wanted to stop your employment with Y-12. Thank you, Dr. Boyd.